More from the World of the First Story

“This is just what I know, and what I know isn’t much. Way back when, and I mean prehistoric way back when, somebody told a story. Maybe it was the very first one, the moment we invented the idea of telling stories. Can you imagine that moment? I mean, think about humanity. We’re storytellers at heart. It’s how we express ideas, how we spread information, it’s how we communicate.”

“It would have changed everything,” Nessa mused. “A seismic shift in our entire species.”

“And moments like that…well, they’re pure magic, in the metaphorical and literal sense. The story made a mark. Left a scar across the entire universe, a scar that couldn’t heal.”
— Detonation Boulevard

The world of the First Story is a sprawling multiverse of dark wonder and cosmic terror, an endless battlefield where archetypes and ideas made flesh fight to shape countless parallel worlds to their design — or simply to survive. The Daniel Faust and Harmony Black series are the core of the setting, with the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy providing connective tissue and a major crossover. However, other glimpses of other worlds are waiting to be discovered.

The Revanche Cycle is a four-book low fantasy series (now collected in a single omnibus edition, as well as available in individual volumes) taking place on one of the worlds next door, a treacherous and crumbling realm inspired by the Italian Renaissance. As the daughter of a dying pope struggles to make her claim on the throne and save her country from falling into corruption, she finds political conspiracies, assassin cults and witch-covens gathering in every shadow, determined to take her down.

In a very different direction, Any Minor World follows a hard-boiled PI on a missing-persons case like none other. Hired to find the author of a mysterious comic book series, Roy Mackey discovers that the author’s creations — including a crew of deranged supervillains — are walking off the printed page and spreading chaos. The only way to fix the crisis is a jaunt across the dimensional veil, to a realm governed by comic-book logic and mired in madness. It wasn’t the job he signed up for, but Roy’s the only one who can save the day.